This is great, thanks! Didn't know the sample was available online.

The more I think about this, the more I'm persuaded that this is the right line to take. It makes the most sense of some difficult concepts. So on to ontological pluralism? Would you agree that we can have that (or the threat of it) regardless of whether QV is workable?

"Numbers are something we do," suggests the question: "why are numbers something we (and animals) do?" All activities have causes, right? — Count Timothy von Icarus

With all respect to @Banno, the formula "Numbers are something we do" could use some clarification. For one thing, it lends itself to the interpretation you're querying here -- that "doing numbers" is just a practice, something we might have chosen to do differently, or not do at all. I don't think this is right, and I don't think Banno needs to hold this position in order to make his point -- though he can tell us if that is so.

I read his position as saying that we wouldn't have numbers if we didn't have mathematics as a whole; that is, numbers "come into existence" as they assume their place within mathematical practice, which is a doing, an activity. You can't "find" 3 but overlook or do without 4, to put it crudely. With numbers, it's all or nothing.

But that understanding, if expressed as "Numbers are something we do," doesn't distinguish between two sets of alternatives, two different questions. The first set of alternatives is: Numbers are either a) found or b) invented. (Let's not worry about getting this more precise, for the moment.) The second set is: Numbers are either a) reflective of the basic structure of reality, or b) arbitrary/pragmatic. (Same caveat here.)

Now if we say "Numbers are something we do," this could mean that we perform them -- or, to put it in more ordinary talk, do mathematics -- as a kind of invention, rather as we might dance or sing. This would be option B of the first set of alternatives. Then again, "Numbers are something we do" might mean "Numbers are [just] something WE do" -- they are indeed arbitrary choices that might have been made differently, had we practiced a different mathematics. This would be option B of the second set of alternatives.

I want to hold out for option B in the first set, and option A in the second set, and I don't know whether "Numbers are something we do" represents a disagreement with me. It needn't, as I'm trying to show. My assertion could mean that numbers as such -- numerals, individual items with names like '7' -- aren't "out there," they aren't found, but nevertheless our choices within mathematics are far from arbitrary or free. This latter clause could be extended to the point of claiming that math (or logic) is perhaps the most basic structure there is, absolutely ontologically fundamental.

The challenge to that position is, How could something so basic not be "out there"? What do I mean by "structure" and "fundamental"? Yeah, that's worth a tome or two, and fortunately Theodore Sider is trying to help us out . . . see his Writing the Book of the World.

So i think we can pass the argument back to those who might support quantifier variance, and ask them to set out explicitly what it is they might mean. — Banno

Yes, since the discussion needs a natural stopping place, we could certainly toss the ball back to the friends of QV. And yet . . . haven't they given us a pretty good explanation of what they mean? To re-quote:

Quantifier-Variance is the doctrine that there are alternative, equally legitimate meanings one can attach to the quantifiers – so that in one perfectly good meaning of ‛there exists’, I may say something true when I assert ‛there exists something which is a compound of this pencil and your left ear’, and in another, you may say something true when you assert ‛there is nothing which is composed of that pencil and my left ear’. — Bob Hale and Crispin Wright

I think a lot of our discussion on this thread has focused on whether these "equally legitimate meanings" are attached to the quantifiers at all. The best anti-QV position is that the existential quantifier always means the same thing, it's the predication of "existence" that changes. So let's say that's true. With a wave of the hand, we can eliminate quantifier variance strictly understood. But as I was saying in a previous post, I don't think we've laid to rest, or explained, the doubts that Hale and Wright express. They want to know whether the "perfectly good meanings" of "there exists" are equally legitimate, equally assertive of truths, equally undistinguished in terms of how well they correspond with or describe reality. They propose QV as a possible explanation of how this could be. Even if we reject that view, the real problem remains, which is, I suggest, ontological pluralism. But that can wait for a new OP.

If someone is sincerely attempting to stay within communicative rationality, then they could not be engaged in performative contradiction, right? If this is right, then to say that his sincerity is unknown is also to say that his status as dictator is unknown. This is a large part of what is tripping me up. — Leontiskos

Yes, it's complex. I keep thinking, though, that a "sincere dictator" isn't impossible. Consider two scenarios: 1. A rational egoist of some stripe enters into dialogue and lays out a case for an essentially first-personal approach to ethics. In the process of doing this, it becomes clear that a consequence of their case is that there's nothing irrational about trying to get people to do what you want. This puts the dictator in performative contradiction, but it doesn't mean that their sincerity breaks down. The dictator sincerely believes that using duplicitous arguments is OK. 2. The first-person dictator isn't intelligent enough to understand the implications of their theory. The dictator sincerely believes that there's no contradiction, but that's wrong. When it's pointed out, the dictator doesn't understand, and persists in trying to make the case. Here the dictator is in contradiction and perhaps revealed as not much of a philosopher, but again, is their sincerity really in doubt?

To summarize, you keep picturing the dictator as wily and manipulative, fully aware of what they're doing, but that may be giving them too much credit, in a way.

Well, if you consider your "apophatic approach" above, it seems that his judgment will be to a large extent inscrutable. It surely cannot be arrived at by any guaranteed decision-procedure, any ready-made method. — Leontiskos

OK, I understand now. And this would be different from how the referee makes his judgments in a basketball game, I presume. Maybe we need to soften words like "inscrutable" and "incorrigible" (as in "the truth which the judgment discerns will presumably be 'incorrigible'"). Rather than "inscrutable," I think your description that disavows "any guaranteed decision-procedure, any ready-made method" is much closer to the mark. And I don't see incorrigibility as really obtaining here. Communicative action is meant to be reliable, resilient, ethical, useful, truth-discovering, etc., but these results are neither certain nor incorrigible -- at least that's my reading of Habermas.

the first question I would ask is whether Rawls could be seen as providing the first move in a dialogical exchange; or on the other hand, whether a dialogical exchange will always require a Rawlsian- (or Kantian-) like argument to set it into motion; or finally, whether a dialogical exchange will always ultimately conclude in a Rawlsian- (or Kantian-) like argument. Again, feel free to ignore this if it is too far off topic. — Leontiskos

Good questions, and I wonder about them too. It's all very well to oppose a Habermasian "actually carried out discourse" with something more abstract, like the Original Position, but what is Habermas really picturing here? Who calls the meeting into session (seriously)? What sort of time commitments are the participants imagined as having? Is there a kind of pre-nup that specifies the normative commitments? My only experience with an "actually carried out discourse" that resembles this somewhat is Quaker governance at my college.

“Every speech-act-immanent obligation can be made good at two levels: immediately, in the context of the utterance, through indicating a corresponding normative context, or in discourse or in subsequent actions. If the immediate justification does not dispel an ad hoc doubt, we pass to the level of discourse where the subject of discursive examination is the validity of the underlying norm.” (Habermas “Communication and the Evolution of Society”p 67) So, when the ‘underlying norm’ is not immediately apparent, one needs to proceed to the more complicated process of exposing the inherent normative nature. — Number2018

Very interesting, thanks.

He views his philosophy as opposing the radical critique of Reason in contemporary poststructuralism. He argues that Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault are exclusively focused on the role of power, and they cannot escape the ‘performative contradiction’ involved in using Reason to criticize Reason. — Number2018

Agreed. Richard J. Bernstein, in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, says this:

Despite his manifest break with the Kantian tradition of transcendental argument, [Habermas] nevertheless leads us to think that a new reconstructive science of communicative action can establish what Kant and his philosophic successors failed to establish -- a solid ground for a communicative ethics.

Interestingly, Bernstein believes this is only one way to describe Habermas's project. He argues that the emphasis should fall more on "pragmatic" than "transcendental," and that Gadamer, for instance, is essentially an ally in this approach, despite their differences. But overall I think you're right to locate Habermas in the tradition of seeking transcendental grounds for our allegiance to Reason. As I was saying in the OP, the valuable progress I see in Habermas is his expansion and analysis of what reason is and does, in actual communication.

I wonder what you mean when you say that numbers are real.
— Janus

That they have a common reference, that the value of a number is not a matter of opinion or choice. — Wayfarer

I'm sympathetic to that view, and offer a homely analogy. We can say true and false things about Sherlock Holmes. That he had lodgings in Baker Street is true. That he wore a long beard is false. Etc. Now we also want to say that, in some important sense, Holmes didn't exist at all. So how can we make T/F assertions about a nonexistent item? This is where "reality" becomes a tempting term to introduce. Holmes didn't and doesn't exist, but he is real if we let "reality" mean "capable of T/F predications".

The analogy with numbers breaks down, though, when we acknowledge that Holmes is without question nonexistent, whereas a mathematical Platonist (not @Wayfarer) would disagree with the way I'm divvying up the terms -- for her, numbers also exist, just not as empirical objects . . . and the dispute goes on. (Perhaps Holmes himself also exists, as a Form, on this view.)

See Popper
— J
I don't recall this - where is it? — Banno

I had in mind his Three Worlds conception, where Russell's individual brain-events would be thoughts in the World 2 sense, whereas the universals or objects of thought would be World 3 items. I like Popper's discussion because he recognized that the World 2/World 3 distinction isn't just about universals, but concerns any "contents of thought" or propositional meaning. That said, I don't know how seriously we need to take the talk of "Worlds".

That's one way of using ∃ as a quantifier and as a predicate - in this case, ∃!, such that ∃!t=df∃x(x=t). — Banno

Yes, good, and that does help me recapture my puzzle about using ∃ that way. One picture: The existential quantifier is austere, a mere operator, and doesn't add anything to whatever terms it operates upon. This matches up with the traditional arguments for why existence can't be a predicate. Another picture: When we make a statement in Logicalese to the effect that ∃x(x=t), we are indeed providing new information; we are predicating existence of 't'. And in that case, if we go on to say ∃!t=df∃x(x=t), we're having it both ways -- quantifier and predicate. This looks right, but . . . what does that commit us to, in re quantifier variance? We'd been exploring the idea, above, that ∃ doesn't actually vary, but rather the sentences differ in what they pick out as existing, i.e., having the predicate 'existence'. We're supposed to be able to hold some sense of 'existence' steady, and my puzzle is, Which one? Existence as ∃, or existence as the predicate 'exists'? What's worse, the more I try to put this into words, the less certain I am that the question is even a good one. I may have merely muddled the terms.

Perhaps relatedly, the "two domains" question is still murky for me. I'm not a strong enough logician to have a worthwhile opinion.

Thanks, it does look interesting.

Isn't there variation in the domain, in what we are talking about, while quantification remains constant? — Banno

I think this is a version of the question that was worrying me, about whether " ‛Ǝ’ is uniquely troublesome in that it’s used to refer to both a quantifier and a predicate." I've tried several times to sort out what I mean but I can't seem to nail it down. If you have time, can you expand on your question? Maybe it will jog my brain.

If we are even to recognise that there are two domains, we must thereby hold quantification constant. — Banno

Yes, that would follow. Are there two domains?

My intuition about the matter is simply that numbers are real but that they don't exist. — Wayfarer

Sure, that's a perfectly good intuition, based on restricting "existence" to a certain range. All the problems come up when someone then asks you, Why make that choice? I don't mean just you, I mean anyone who wants to say something using words like "real" and "exist". What sort of case are philosophers supposed to make for their choices here?

Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.

-- Russell

Russell's distinction here is good to keep in mind. See Popper for an even better explanation of how thoughts differ from the objects of thought.

"We shall find it convenient only to speak of things existing when they are in time."

--Russell

Back to the point above, notice Russell's justification for his choice about "existence": convenience! I think most of the good arguments for how to use words like "existence" are pragmatic -- we want to use the words in the ways that will help us frame the questions we're trying to ask. There is, arguably, some sort of "best way" to do this, but it doesn't start by sending a team of metaphysicians to beat the bushes and bring back an actual sample of "existence" or "reality".

↪J Oh, that thread dropped off my list. I didn't see your last reply. Still the most annoying question on the forums. — Banno

Do I get a prize? :halo:

↪Wayfarer's is not just a "terminological question". It's (potentially) a choice between grammars, between languages. Which implies quantifier variance. Which I think we (you and I) are inclined here to deny. — Banno

You're right, the question expands beyond terminology to language itself. I was trying to keep it snappy. As for QV, I'm still plumbing the depths of the arguments. Though yes, at this point I'm inclined to deny it, or at least doubt it strongly, for Siderian reasons (see that other OP).

"The eternal Thompson gunner, still wandering through the night" . . . there's a Schopenhauerian thought for you.

I have only a terminological question. . . You say that the 'truth about N is deemed to exist independently of any mathematical systems'. My terminological question is, is 'exist' a correct choice of words in this context? — Wayfarer

Only a terminological question? By no means -- it's the question. @Banno is getting at the same thing:

N exists independently from PA.
— Tarskian
I don't have a clear idea of what you mean by "exists" here. Same for "preexisting" in the next paragraph. — Banno

Absent an agreed-upon use of the existential quantifier, you can read the "ontology of numbers" question pretty much any way you want. I started a thread here a while back that might be of interest.

‘Clear cognitive commitment’ means that the speaker and her hearer, involved in the speech act, can offer a socially justified account of their communicative action. The intention should have the possibility of making it public, transparent,
and defendable: — Number2018

Thanks, that makes sense.

The point I defend here is that even if "in general, we "read" each other's illocutionary stances very well," in most cases, we cannot accurately account for our performative situations. When asked about our or other intentions, we usually quickly resort to standard explanatory schemes. Habermas admits the necessity of covering the gap. "In order to make necessary statements, we need to change our perspective…We need a theoretically constituted perspective." Yet, the rationality of verifying procedure remains at the level of the logical-positivist constative utterance. In fact, Habermas's commitment to communication verification requirements means resorting to the dogmatic question of reference or constative truth. He has pushed the philosophy of performative forces back to the search for the founding transcendental conditions. — Number2018

There's a lot to unpack here.

- Could you give an example of how a person would resort to standard explanatory schemes concerning their intentions?

- How does the issue of necessary statements arise in this context?

- T/F is certainly one way of deciding a verification question, but why must the verifying procedure remain at this level? Why would the procedure be (necessarily) dogmatic?

I agree that Habermas is searching for transcendental conditions. Are you placing this in opposition to a particular understanding of performativity?

Again, I appreciate your willingness to break this down for me.

I suppose this brings us back to the same question of what the "first-person dictator" even is, and it feels like we are going in circles. I think the problem is that we have no definition of what 'rational' and 'irrational' are supposed to mean. — Leontiskos

I agree that there is a kind of circle happening here, or perhaps better, there are two possible paths toward understanding what the dictator is doing, and we keep going down first one, then the other. Down the first path, Dictator 1 remains in communication with others, and tries to justify himself. He attempts (with what sincerity we can't say) to stay within communicative rationality. According to Habermas, this is a performative contradiction because the dictator can't rationally do this. Like it or not, whether he acknowledges it or not, his performative contradiction takes him outside communicative action.

Down the other path, Dictator 2 makes no attempt to justify himself -- or perhaps, his justifications make no use of rational argument. Here we want to say that this person has never even entered the arena of communicative action. He might just as well refuse to respond at all (another type of Habermasian irrationality, as we know).

I think we do have definitions, or at least descriptions, of what "rational" and "irrational" mean. We just have to constantly bear in mind that for Habermas, communicative rationality is not the same thing as standard strategic or goal-oriented rationality -- but nor does it replace it. It's an expansion of what it means to be rational.

Now you keep raising the possibility that the dictator rationally justify his actions. — Leontiskos

Not quite. The possibility I raise is that the dictator may attempt this (again, with what sincerity we can't say; see the discussion with @Number2018 above). If Habermas is right, the attempt must fail, as you point out. But I see a difference between trying to make a case for first-person dictatorship, and simply trying to be one. What I don't know is what kind of difference -- that is, whether the distinction is trivial or irrelevant to the overall conception.

I think what you are saying is that Habermasian judgment is bound up with transcendental reason itself. . . . The implication here would be that the first-person dictator is fundamentally irrational, and that therefore his use of reason is really a faux-use of reason; a performative contradiction.

Personally I think Habermas is more or less correct in this. — Leontiskos

Yes, me too, and I think you've got Habermas right.

Still, there is no way to pragmatically test whether a "Habermasian definitive judgment" is true. — Leontiskos

Can you say more? I'm not quite following.

I am still unclear about how Habermas is supposed to have improved on Kant. — Leontiskos

I alluded above to their different conceptions of how practical reason operates. Habermas opposes what he calls "monological" reasoning toward universality. He claims that Kant (and Rawls) do this. Instead, he favors actual dialogue, not thought experiments, an "actually carried out discourse." He wants, for instance, a genuine attempt to learn what exchanging roles would mean when we discuss fairness or justice, not merely the Rawlsian imagining of an Original Position. I would call this an improvement because it truly opens the discussion to the unexpected, and thus emphasizes the equality (not egalitarianism) of communicative action.

There's more to be said about Kant and Habermas's conceptions of reason overall (not just practical reason), but I'll pause here.

I appreciate your patience in trying to understand my posts. — Number2018

And I appreciate yours, in sharing your understanding of Habermas, which may well be more extensive than mine. (I only discovered him a few years ago.)

for Habermas, the claim for rationality is non-separatable from the binding force of reciprocal recognition of validity claims: "With their illocutionary acts, speaker and hearer raise validity claims and demand they be recognized. But this recognition need not follow irrationally, since the validity claims have a cognitive character and can be checked" — Number2018

Right. The contradiction is indeed between content and illocutionary act.

Both stances do not satisfy this description of communicative action. One cannot demand recognition of the validity of her egoistic, self-selfish intentions. — Number2018

OK, though maybe better to say "argue for" rather than "demand"? The contradiction as such would come with the attempt at argumentation, would it not?

For Searle, any language usage is precluded by the communication of intended meanings. On the contrary, for Derrida, communication is carried along not by clear subjective intentions but by impersonal performative forces. — Number2018

(Just confirming, you probably mean "any language usage is defined by" or "limited to," rather than "precluded by"? Searle argues for intentions, Derrida for . . . well, whatever performative forces are.)

The stance may be incorporated within endless performative recontextualizations so that Habermas's requirement of the clear cognitive commitment to communication cannot be univocally verified. — Number2018

Excellent point. Does it damage Habermas's theory? It may well, if we insist on understanding "clear cognitive commitment" as being the same as having an intention, and bring to bear some of the standard puzzles about intention.

the performative nature of the participants' illocutionary force remains opaque and undetermined not just in the discussed examples but in most non-normative social situations. — Number2018

Why do you say this? Again, I may not be understanding clearly, but I would have said that "opaque" is much too strong, "undetermined" usually not the case, and that in general we "read" each other's illocutionary stances very well. The question I see being raised is more along the lines of, "But doesn't Habermas assume intention as trumping performance?" How we then go on to determine intention is a separate and, I'm saying, generally easier question. Could you say more?

You place on the one hand the dictator who "tries to get the better of others by using rhetoric, specious arguments," and on the other hand the dictator who uses, "shabby, irrational pseudo-arguments [as] a completely rational means to his ends." They seem like the same thing, not two different things. — Leontiskos

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about the difference between the two. Dictator 1 makes a genuine argument for his ethical stance -- he tries to show why it's rational to get others to do what he wants -- and in the course of making that argument, he mentions (not uses) the shabby pseudo-arguments that are part of his tactics, and perhaps explains why there's nothing wrong with using such rhetoric in service of his rational ends. Dictator 2 merely deploys the bad arguments. Does that help? I'm trying to highlight the difference between making a rational case for using irrational arguments, and actually using them. One could be quite sincere in the first case, but never in the second.

I would welcome the idea that Habermas is open to transcending intersubjectivity and/or consensus, but it remains true that if Habermas is not able to definitively judge someone like the first-person dictator then I don't see how the transcendental part will help him. — Leontiskos

The rules need to be enforced, else they may as well not exist. — Leontiskos

I think I see where you're coming from with the judging idea, but enforcement is separate. Concerning judging, "definitively" may be key here. To return to the basketball game, the referee/judge makes absolute and authoritative decisions. Let's call those "definitive." We know that the referee, if he's a good one, must make those decisions. The rules allow for no others. Turning to communicative action, you ask whether Habermas can assume the role of a referee/judge and declare the first-person dictator "out of bounds," as it were.

Two answers suggest themselves. The first is, Yes, of course he can. That is exactly what a performative contradiction is -- a violation of the rules.

The second answer is less certain but more interesting, and perhaps closer to what you're asking about. In what sense will Ref Habermas's call be "definitive"? Can we ask, in fairness, "Definitive according to what or whom?" With a basketball game, there's a ready reply: The rules were laid down by a group charged with laying them down, and that's that. Rational discourse is different. Habermasian communicative rationality begins from the intersubjective origins or constraints of rationality itself. So Ref Habermas, in appealing to rules like "no performative contradiction," isn't appealing to something that transcends intersubjectivity itself. Nor is it something he could have discovered by himself, in solitary transcendental reflection (that would be missing the pragmatic turn). But nor is he saying, "Well, you guys decide and we'll go with the majority opinion." If "definitive" can describe this, then I think a Habermasian judgment can be definitive.

But what happens next? That's the "enforcement" part, I suppose. What you say about the dangers of not enforcing rules is no doubt true, but it's a bit outside the scope of what Habermas is arguing for. To carry that thought further, I think we would need to get more precise about what sort of group is engaged in this communicative action. I'm not sure there can be an abstract explanation of how to enforce a rule; not even Kant tried to do that (perhaps by suggesting that the liar should be shunned at universities? :wink: )

And so the question recurs, "In virtue of what does Habermas' obligation apply to the dictator?" — Leontiskos

In virtue of the dictator's desire, if they have one, to be rational. This sounds weak, but we have to remember that Habermas doesn't think you can just remove yourself from dialogue. That too is, for him, unreasonable. Stephen K. White puts it well: "A refusal by the first-person dictator or the free rider to justify himself requires a systematic renunciation of communicative action which throws his rationality radically into question."

Beyond this, we arrive at questions about what, if anything, could constitute an obligation in ethical theory, and that would take us far afield.

I take it that this more specific kind of [first-person] dictator is a sophist or propagandist, engaged in duplicity or dissimulation, which are often included as a form of lying. — Leontiskos

For the sake of argument: Why couldn’t the dictator genuinely believe that it’s rational to advocate dominance over others? In that case, he’d be offering what he perceives to be genuine arguments in his favor. The other case is the one you’re imagining: The dictator tries to get the better of others by using rhetoric, specious arguments, etc.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think Habermas wants us to imagine the first, “genuine” type of dictator. Remember, the key point is the rationality of the position. Anyone can try to dominate others by false rhetorical tactics, and those tactics needn’t be rational in the least. What we want to know is, if the dictator is willing to argue for his actual ethical stance, and claim that his use of shabby, irrational pseudo-arguments is a completely rational means to his ends, could he do it without contradiction?

The difficulty with the sophist is that they are slippery, namely because they wish to appear to be engaging in "communicative action," when in fact they are not. — Leontiskos

This would be the dissimulating type, above. But consider Thrasymachus again – is he dissimulating? (He’s not a sophist, of course.) I read his arguments as entirely sincere. Indeed, if he’d thought about them more carefully, and taken a better measure of Socrates, he’d have either kept silent or come up with another plan to get his own way (or show off his rhetorical chops!); being sincere didn't work. I’m not too comfortable saying that Socrates reveals a performative contradiction in Thrasymachus’ position, but he certainly reveals that position as undefendable, at least by Thrasymachus, and even causes him to blush with shame.

The integrity of the intersubjective project will paradoxically depend on the ability of participants to make definitive—and to that extent non-communicative—judgments. — Leontiskos

Very interesting. For me, this raises a characteristically modern ethical problem: To what extent is this kind of judgment possible? The analogy with a basketball game places the referee above the intersubjective system (the game), but is this really the case? In one sense, he’s the judge, and his call on a particular play is authoritative; he doesn’t require everyone to agree with him. But in another sense, the referee is completely at the mercy of the rules, to the extent that he’s an accurate and fair judge. And those rules we have to imagine being generated intersubjectively; here the game analogy breaks down, but that’s OK. Habermas wants the rules of his “game” to arise from “transcendental/pragmatic” intersubjective agreement. The transcendental part is important. This isn’t just a matter of consensus. We’re supposed to understand communicative rationality as invoking certain background conditions that are necessary (though perhaps not sufficient) for rationality to exist. It then becomes pragmatic, because we agree on ways to apply such rationality in our time, in our circumstances.

I more or less agree with this, though as I say, I don't know if I'm agreeing on Habermas's behalf or not. He might mean that even the dictator, by simply opening his mouth and addressing us, has put in place some of the terms of communicative action. But only some, unless we take a very cynical view of "reaching an understanding." I'm more inclined to think that, unless the dictator stays engaged and tries to defend his position, he does indeed remove himself from communicative action.

Also, the term "first-person dictator" can be a little misleading. The dictator is not imagined as doing what real-life dictators mostly do, which is, as you say, commanding and threatening. The first-person dictator position is an ethical stance, which claims that it's perfectly rational for me to try to get other people to do what I want, as far as possible. This desire needn't be fulfilled only by standard dictatorial tactics. In part this is why I think it's plausible that Habermas might be picturing the first-person dictator as being willing to stay engaged in communicative action.

Staying with Plato, Thrasymachus could be said to espouse the first-person dictator position. It's often been asked, Why does Thrasymachus, given his views, bother talking in the agora at all? (Pride in his rhetorical skills, perhaps.). For Habermas, I think Thrasymachus is an example of a first-person dictator who wants to convince others that his views are correct, but is in performative contradiction by doing so.

I am wondering what reason we have to think that the first-person dictator and the free rider are engaged in what Habermas calls "communicative action."* It seems to me that such persons are explicitly intending to not participate in "communicative action." They wish to be uncooperative, not cooperative. Therefore they don't seem to have the obligation you speak of. They would say, "I am not raising a claim within the context of communicative action, and therefore I have no such obligation." — Leontiskos

Yes, this is similar to the first point that White raises when he pushes back on Habermas's communicative action schema: "Is the obligation to provide justification really a necessary one (does it have to follow from the idea of communicative action itself)?" I think you're pointing to an ambiguity in Habermas (or Habermas as I've been presenting him; I may be the one who doesn't read him clearly). It's this: Are we being asked to imagine the dictator, say, simply stating their position and then refusing further discussion? Or are we supposed to imagine this person arguing for the position? This would seem to make a big difference along the lines you're wondering about. At what point does the schema begin? If I say, "I am not making a claim within the context of communicative action," have I already performatively contradicted myself, according to Habermas?

I'm not sure, but I'll spend some more time with it and see if I get any illumination.

I am curious to see an argument you would give in favor of the Habermasian position, and I am specifically interested to see how (if at all) it deviates from Kantianism. — Leontiskos

Fair enough, though a tall order. The deviation from Kantianism can at least be sketched in this way: Kant's practical rationality simply isn't Habermas's. For Kant, practical reason remains a one-player game; it can all be worked out by oneself; for Habermas, not so. Much more to be said, of course.

I agree that the "contradiction" that rules out lying, for Kant, might be a cousin of "performative contradiction," but not really the same thing.

To be continued . . .

Yet, we should not take ‘a commitment to intersubjectivity’, ‘achieving a mutual understanding,’ and ‘sharing a common lifeworld’s horizon’ as a set of ultimate transcendental conditions. — Number2018

OK, that fits my reading of Habermas here. The quoted phrases are what require explanation or understanding, based on the principles of communicative rationality. They aren't the conditions from which explanation proceeds. We still need to ask the transcendental question, How are they possible?

Both stances are applied here in a double sense: as theoretical constructions and as examples of our daily pragmatical encounters. Therefore, both domains inform each other and create a shortcut; they are overloaded with our habitual experience. This situation makes the stances completely understandable but raises questions about the grounds of our social expositions — Number2018

Hmm, I might be getting closer. Let me try to paraphrase you:

We encounter the dictator and the free-rider in actual life, not merely as philosophical possibilities. We've gotten so used to hearing both these stances expressed (with varying degrees of subtlety, presumably) that we "understand them completely," but we need to ask whether this is really the case. Are we simply assuming their rationality -- a kind of "familiarity breeds plausibility" situation?

You can tell me if this is indeed close to your meaning. I admit I'm a little thrown by "grounds of our social expositions" -- exposures? expositions as in "laying out a case"?

I am Rorty's opposite, really: loosely speaking, he says nothing is metaphysical. I say everything is metaphysical! — Astrophel

:grin:

Yes, this gets to the heart of it. One place where I am unclear concerning Habermas is the distinction he makes between communicative action as such, and what he calls "the modern concept of argumentation," which Stephen K. White claims is where the "rules of discourse" properly enter the picture. This would be an "ideal speech situation" aimed entirely at reaching a consensus for action. On your understanding, is this the context in which the "intuitively known, unproblematic, unanalyzable, holistic background” needs to be assumed?

Where I'm going with this is: Can we turn away from this modern problematic, which certainly raises all the doubts you cite, and find something in the more basic concept of communicative action that would be transcendental in Habermas's sense that it would remain in any background of any "common lifeworld"? In other words, perhaps we can find a way of showing that a commitment to intersubjectivity transcends the (temporary, contingent) modern, and is built in to the structure of communicative action itself.

Concerning the dictator and the free rider: I'm not sure what you mean. You ask what makes these stances "understandable and articulable." Do you mean by us, as samples of ethical stances that may or may not be rational? Or do you mean within Habermasian communicative action, as samples of stances that cannot be argued because they are performative contradictions? If you could say more about that, I could better understand your further point about embedded practices that separate normal from abnormal.

Because people's sense of what is valuable do not align with one another in often radical ways, a rational procedural ethics, like Habermas' . . . tries to find what is not so ambiguous to do the work of settling things, reducing ethics to principles. But this, I think I mentioned above, makes the procedure of ethics pragmatic, a working out of how to explain and convince, but, and this is an important point, this only replaces what failed in the original ethical problematic, which is the response of care, the "originary" procedural ethical remedy to issues where value is in play. — Astrophel

I'm not sure "trying to find what is not so ambiguous" really captures Habermasian communicative action. Habermas wants to generate additional or further norms out of normative discourse -- in other words, we can learn what is ethical by engaging in dialogue that observes its own ethical rules. This is procedural because, while we can know beforehand what normative discourse entails, we can't know what further ethics might be generated as we engage in communicative action on a particular topic. This is indeed pragmatic in a certain sense -- Habermas himself called the process "transcendental-pragmatic."

I think you're also saying that, without a basic commitment to the value of "care," none of this can result in anything more than a pragmatic remedy. You may even be saying that we need more than a commitment to care as a value -- a person must actually feel or experience care in order to act ethically. Could you say more about all this? Have I got it right?

I don't think crazy people are irrational. They just work in a world of nontypical challenging circumstances — Astrophel

If rationality is understood in the non-Habermasian sense of "strategic or goal-directed reason," then you're absolutely right. (Isaiah Berlin has the example of a man whose delight in life is to push pins into various objects. He pursues this goal with perfect strategic rationality.) Habermas is arguing for an expanded sense of what it means to be rational -- see my example of how we might say "You're being unreasonable!" to the person who refuses to talk about an issue of group concern. I'm not a big fan or ordinary-language philosophy, but I think we can learn a lot sometimes from how language is used in everyday situations. Consider another phrase: "She's lost her reason," describing someone who is going mad. Or "There's no reasoning with him!", said of someone who refuses to change directions no matter what is said to him.

You raise a good point about whether, and how, to connect norms of rationality with other cultural norms. We may deplore the unreasonable person for refusing to converse; may we also deplore the gay person for refusing to be heteronormative? Clearly we shouldn't, so we need to understand the difference here.

From whence comes this allegiance to reason given that reason itself, as Hume said long ago, has no ethical content — Astrophel

How do you imagine Rorty might respond to this frame of his ideas? — Tom Storm

I hope Astrophel will answer, but my response would be: Rorty's allegiance was contingent and pragmatic. He thought that reason was a historical phenomenon that could be given different descriptions based on what society it emerged in. For "liberal ironists" like Rorty, our form of reason is useful in getting us where we want to go. That's all the allegiance it requires. (I think there are a lot of things wrong with this picture; I'm just trying to respond as I believe Rorty would.)

The quote from him is rather touching. Odd to hear him using phrases like "fully human" . . .

Value is the essence of ethics, I mean, it is such that were it to be removed from an ethical issue, the issue itself would simply vanish. — Astrophel

Thanks for your reply, Astrophel. What you say about value and ethics is true when ethics is conceived as being about specific content, such as the virtues. But procedural ethics, as envisioned by Kant, Rawls, and Habermas, is different. The overriding idea here is we can only know what is ethical – what ought to be valued, what is worth valuing – by discovering whether certain procedural criteria can be fulfilled using the concept in question. For Kant, the criteria involved universalizability; for Rawls, they begin with fairness in an ideal “state of nature” situation (his Original Position). Habermas is in this tradition, and I’ve by no means mastered his theory of communicative action, which is complicated and has a lot of “rules of discourse.” But it is also procedural in that ethical values follow rationally from an understanding of what rationality itself is. And remember, for Habermas this understanding is not merely strategic or contextual.

I like to think of the two approaches as crude mirror images. Value- or virtue-based ethics starts with the goal (identified values) and asks what procedure we need to adopt to get there. Procedural ethics starts with determining a fair procedure, and claims that anything that can pass the fairness test will be a value, or at least not unethical. (Which is extremely dubious, but I’m trying to lay out the positions fairly.)

Habermas is like Rorty and his insistence on the "solidarity" of our existence — Astrophel

I agree, but this is just about the only place they resemble each other! Habermas is the very opposite of an ironist, and wants to base his version of solidarity on rationalist criteria that are in no way deconstructible. (At one point he explicitly rejects “the conclusions that Rorty and Derrida draw” from the failure of more traditional rationalist projects.) And, as I tried to suggest in my OP, Habermas wants to expand our understanding of rationality precisely because he wants to give it a normative content. He would probably agree that what I called strategic rationality is indeed empty of content – in part, that’s why it’s been so amenable to misuse in the ways that Weber analyzed. But Habermas’s communicative rationality is – or wants to be – very different.

So what, I commit a performative contradiction. Am I a piano key? asks Dostoyevsky. — Astrophel

I know, there’s always the temptation to urge a kind of radical freedom, including freedom from the constraints of rationality. But Habermas is trying to make that position even less appealing. To commit a performative contradiction isn’t merely illogical, it also begins the process of cutting you off from community, and communication. I suppose the challenge from radical freedom can simply be repeated ad infinitum – So what if I go a little mad? So what if no one listens to me? So what if . . . -- but I think we enter somewhat fantastical territory at that point.

You mentioned Wittgenstein and ethics. Do you have the time to say more about his views? I haven’t read his Lecture on Ethics. Is the idea that values would not be found among the facts about the world?

I agree that this is a difficult argument to make, because it challenges our basic intuitions about what makes an X an X. I could reply, “Right, I think a strictly physical meaning-carrier can’t exist,” and go on, “Yes, the copy is, in a sense, simultaneously a subvenient term and not a subvenient term.” But instead, let’s look at an analogous situation.

Suppose I showed you an arrangement of objects on the floor of a museum – a shoe, a T-square, and a rope, perhaps. We could say several things about what this “is”. We could identify each object accurately. We could put our mereological hat on and declare it a composite object, and name it “Trio”. We could also – and this is the important part – call it an art object. Now what makes it an art object is debatable; it may be as simple as its presence in a museum, or it may be more complicated than that. (Never mind, of course, whether it’s good art.) But we have to agree that there is indeed this third level of “is-ness,” of being, without which we’d be at a loss to explain almost all of the important facts about the "three objects on the museum floor" situation.

The two factors I would point to as most significant in making “Trio” an art object are, first, the meaning that is given to it by human consciousnesses, and second, the fact that this meaning is essentially relational, that is, at least one other person has to agree to see “Trio” as art.

Now for the photocopy. I’m arguing that it isn’t yet a subvenient term because no human consciousness has entered into that relation with it. Nothing is “naturally” a subvenient, or supervenient, term, just as nothing is naturally an art object. If someone comes along and reads meaning into the copied page, we can now identify a supervenience relation, with the page + letter-meanings as the subvenient term, and the meaning of the page as a whole as the supervenient term. You wrote, “In one way these two things are the same thing, and in another way they are different things," and that’s it exactly.

A ways earlier, I’d suggested that this is largely a terminological matter, and this is part of what I meant by that. Not much rests on how we choose to designate all this. For most discourse about supervenience, it’s probably easier to use the familiar shortcut and think of mental meanings supervening on physical objects, as if this were the only way it could happen. I was just wanting to hold out for the more complex formulation, as being (perhaps pedantically) more accurate.

"...an upside-down G has shape meaning but not linguistic meaning..." The ability to recognize shapes requires a sufficiently sophisticated mind and visual apparatus. You could think about this developmentally. Children can recognize shapes. Older children can recognize letters. Older children can recognize words, etc. Even the recognition of shape in that first step is mental. — Leontiskos

I’m sure this is true, but aren’t you begging the question if you talk about a “shape meaning”? I’m questioning whether what we recognize in a shape is any sort of meaning at all. I think I have ordinary usage on my side, for what that’s worth. “What does that shape mean?” is an odd question, except under quite special circumstances.

About music: Yes, there’s an up side to non-musical info creeping into our musical experience. When I’m working with music, I’m certainly grateful that I can place my musical materials theoretically into a larger context. They become richer, and my use of them, hopefully, better.

For Aristotle the matter/form duality does not merely apply to "physical" realities, although such realities are the clearest example, and are therefore the starting point — Leontiskos

Interesting, I didn’t know that. So a proposition, say, has something resembling a matter/form division?

when a copy machine makes a copy of a book page do you deny that it is merely copying the subvenient term (the Aristotelian matter-correlate)? — Leontiskos

Yes, I do, if the subvenient term you’re referring to is the one that is subsequently going to be part of a supervenience relation with words and sentences. What the copier copies is a physical object, without any “meaning level.” No surprise, the copier can’t enter into any sort of relation with anything, so its copy isn’t a subvenient term. Now, if a person reads the copied page, something different happens. The meaning-level of the letters is revealed, first, and then a supervenience relation is created between this subvenient term (a hybrid that comprises both physical objects and meanings) and what supervenes upon it (the meaning of the words, the sentences, the entire page).

For this to make sense, you also have to accept a kind of “principle of indiscernibles” which states that a copied page can be two things at once, depending on who’s looking. Before you reject that out of hand, consider that this principle can explain, among other things, how art happens – how a physical object can be simply that, and also, under the right circumstances, a work of art. (cf. Arthur Danto) For that matter, consider transubstantiation . . .

All truths are mental, whether they be meaning-truths or shape-truths or ink-truths. — Leontiskos

Yes, but what they are true about can range on a spectrum from strictly physical to strictly mental. I admit I don’t understand why there can’t be anything non-mental.

I think you may be conflating meaning with the mental. I would either want to say that an upside-down G has shape meaning but not linguistic meaning, or else I would want to say that it has no (semiotic/linguistic) meaning, but it is nevertheless "mental." — Leontiskos

Similar perplexity here. I suppose a hardcore idealism would insist that everything is mental, in the sense that everything we know about is a product of our minds . . . but that’s a hard sell, and I wouldn’t have thought you endorsed it. (Unless you mean that, since according to theism a creator Mind creates matter, then in that sense it’s all mental? But surely that doesn’t alter our human distinctions of mental and physical?) Maybe you could say more about the upside-down G shape understood as (semiotic/linguistic) meaningless but nevertheless “mental.” Get rid of those scare-quotes! :wink:

I understand the Beatles example now, thanks. The phenomenon you’re describing is a common one for musicians, and often vexing. For instance, I would dearly love to be able to hear song X with an “innocent ear,” unencumbered by theoretical baggage, but since I’ve been a working musician all my life and my brain now performs certain kinds of analysis automatically, this is extremely difficult for me. So the Beatles lyrics are like the theoretical baggage, in that both obscure something more basic and, arguably, more purely musical.

In one sense you are asking an Aristotelian to show you matter without form, and this is impossible. — Leontiskos

For Aristotle the matter-form compound is irreducible, and so this phenomenon is everywhere, and like "turtles all the way down." There simply is no getting outside of it. — Leontiskos

This is an important clarification, and if I appeared to be asking for matter without form, I shouldn’t have been. The question, whether matter can be known without form, is an interesting one, and I tend to agree with Aristotle that it can’t, but it’s not germane to the question that I (and I think the OP) was raising, which is about meaning, not form.

I assume that Aristotle, while averring that “it’s form all the way down,” would still call any such combination of matter and form “physical.” So would I. Otherwise, we’d have nothing to contrast with “mental.” Simply adding form to matter – assuming they could even be cognized as separate – doesn’t make the resulting phenomenon mental. (Let’s sidestep phenomenal vs. noumenal, which also doesn’t seem germane here.) So what we’re left with is what most everyone agrees to call the physical world, matter plus form . . . but then there’s the pesky issue of meanings, which is something else again. It may be “form all the way down,” but it isn’t “meaning all the way down,” and that’s the problem.

Let’s try to rephrase it: We both agree that an upside-down G is matter-plus-form but no meaning (for English speakers). We also agree that the rightside-up G is matter-plus-form-plus-meaning. Here is where the “strictly physical” and “strictly mental” supervenience takes place. The meaning is now supervenient on the matter-plus-form, aka the physical object. But my point all along has been that the infusion or importation of meaning occurs at this level, not at the level of words. By the time we get to “the meaning of a word supervenes on letter-changes,” we’re already working with a subvenient term (the letter) which involves the physical coupled with a meaning. So the (not very dramatic) conclusion is that the supervenience relation between letter and word can’t be called “strictly physical / strictly mental”. We’ve agreed that the letter G already has meaning, and I think we agree that meaning is a mental phenomenon, albeit at times obscure.

G-conceived-as-a-letter is already a matter-form compound (where "form" here indicates semantic/linguistic form). — Leontiskos

Based on the above, we now need to make this more precise. We know that the G-shape would be a matter-form compound regardless, since turtles etc. By introducing the idea of semantic/linguistic form, we’ve moved into a different use of the word “form” -- indeed, it’s what I’m calling “meaning” (or perhaps cf. Clive Bell’s “significant form”). And you rightly point out that the form in this sense can’t be perceived physically. To look for it absent the mental would be a kind of category error. (I leave aside whether it’s really a good idea to use “form” in both these senses.) And then everything you say about how the mental and physical intermingle follows.

About the Beatles example: I had trouble following it because I wasn’t sure how you were using “linguistic form” here. Do you mean that the Beatles-person hears the lyrics in their head as the tune plays, while the other doesn’t? Why would this mean that the Beatles-person can’t hear the matter-relata at all? I’m not clear about the “indecipherable aspect” of the melody. I’m sure there’s more to it, if you wouldn’t mind breaking it down for me. (Or do you simply mean that the non-Beatles person is having a better time of it because unbothered by those silly lyrics? :wink: )

I agree with all of this, and I think it’s a good account of how the process works. My nagging question is, in a way, terminological, but it may be important when we remember that the word/meaning example was originally given as an analogy to the harder question about how rational/mental meanings can supervene on physical systems tout court. Let me try to restate it, and perhaps in doing so I’ll find the answer!

The letter G, on my understanding, is not a (merely) physical item. To be seen as “the letter G”, to be recognized as such, is also to apprehend its meaning. One reason we know this is true is that infinitely many versions of the letter may be written – physical alterations, in other words – without altering our ability to recognize it as the letter G.

So we can’t use the letter G as the subvenient term in a supervenience relation between the strictly physical and the strictly mental. The letter G is already a hybrid, it already requires mental content, or meaning (or whatever term is least controversial) in order to be paired with what supervenes upon it.

Now there’s no rule that says that the only kind of supervenience is between the strictly physical and the strictly mental. But that is the most common use of the term, and I think it’s the one we should be concerned about here. Again, remember that we want to wind up with a better understanding of the OP question about the two kinds of causation, re the dominoes. I agree with @Wayfarer that these correspond to efficient and formal cause, but this merely shows us that the problem is a very old one. “Formal cause” is a sort of blank check, and we need to cash it out in a way that doesn’t turn it into just another physical cause in fancy dress.

So maybe the question about the letter G becomes: If there were a strictly physical subvenient item somewhere in the neighborhood, where would we look for it? On my view, it has to be “beneath” or “prior to” the letter G itself, which is already a physical/meaning hybrid.

"Change" is applied to the meaning of (written) words insofar as the letters change, not insofar as the serifs change. — Leontiskos

Right, that’s what we want to say. But is this really a supervenience on strictly physical reality? Let’s back up: What makes a letter the key unit of significance, and thus one of the physical items upon which the meaning of a word may supervene? What happens between the serif and the letter, as it were? This is all presumably a matter of convention, but we still must ask, At what point does the meaning get injected? I can say “ArchG [that is, the archetypal letter G upon which various calligraphical variations may be built] is, in English, the 7th letter of the alphabet” and say similar things about H’s position, and I’s, etc. That’s what the physical item means, or symbolizes, along with, perhaps, some pronunciation rules.

But what’s the difference, what happened, between, say, an upside-down G, which means nothing, and good old G? How does the “correct” physical organization produce meaning? Don’t we want to say that the meaning comes from somewhere else entirely, namely whatever group of humans have contrived this alphabet? (Or, as you put it, “a mind is infusing material reality with meaning.”) So by the time we arrive at the level of “the meaning of a word supervening on letter-changes,” we’re already working with a dual description, i.e., G as physical item, and G as symbol. Therefore (finally!): Can this really be supervenience between the physical and the mental, if G is already being used as a meaning vehicle? What is the (allegedly) strictly physical description of the subvenient set?

These are real questions on my part. I’m not sure about any of it.

I would want to say that the rational/mental meaning supervenes on the purely physical system, in much the same way that the meaning of a word supervenes on the written symbols or spoken phonemes. — Leontiskos

Interesting. I think the problem here is that a written symbol or a spoken phoneme already has meaning built into it, in your sense. Consider the written symbol, strictly as a physical object. If I remove a serif from one of the letters, this ought to change something in the meaning of the word, on strict supervenience. It doesn’t, of course, because we don’t really begin from the physical objects when we consider the word/meaning relation; we’ve already been taught how a letter of the alphabet works, and why there can be infinitely many permutations of calligraphy that don’t affect meaning.

Not to say that supervenience is dead wrong here. Could you work up an example that preserves the basic “if A changes, then B changes” idea of supervenience as applied to symbols and meanings?

I agree, it's a good question, but I think we need to sharpen it, as follows:

"What caused the last domino to fall?"

This prevents at least some of the "resolution by ambiguity" responses we'd be tempted to make (different levels of "why" questions, etc.). The reason the question is interesting -- and hard to answer -- is because it's asking if some kind of mental or "rational" causality is even possible. You can't get to a putative "dual explanation" until you first take a position on this kind of causality, and whether chains of physical causality can ever be grounded in the mental.

Your reply reveals an unintended ambiguity in what I wrote. By talking about consciousness as an "exclusively biological phenomenon" I was meaning to contrast that view with another current hypothesis, that nonbiological entities like computers might also be conscious. But you quite plausibly took this in a different direction: whether a "biological" -- in the sense of physical or scientific -- understanding of consciousness would necessarily be reductionist, leaving no room for what you call "add-on" features like imagination or, in my examples, rationality.

Pretending to be a scientist for a moment, my hunch is that consciousness will indeed prove to be an exclusively biological phenomenon, in the sense I originally meant. But that would have no bearing on whether the subjective products of consciousness have the objective or universal qualities that Nagel and others believe they do. That's why I think it remains a philosophical rather than a scientific question.

What do you see as the overriding and outstanding issues of the philosophy of mind in the twentieth first century? Is there any essential debate beyond the scope of psychology? — Jack Cummins

Getting back to your original question: I’d rather answer it as if you’d asked, “What should be the outstanding issues?” I’m sure @Wayfarer and others may be right in describing the current dominance of reductive physicalism within academia, but fashions change.

The most important scientific questions should focus on trying to learn what consciousness is – whether it’s a biological phenomenon exclusively, and whether some Copernican revolution will emerge in our understanding of how the mental and the physical are lawfully connected. Fascinating as this is, it’s not for philosophers to weigh in on.

Rather, I think the “essential debate” for us hasn’t changed much. It was, and is, “How can the subjective processes and procedures of consciousness produce things like ‛ideas,’ ‛concepts,’ ‛meanings,’ ‛truths’? How can these interior, 1st-person-point-of-view results be given a description that does justice to what they seem to demonstrate – namely, that reasons are not caused, and are not causes, in the same way that physical processes are?” I reveal my biases here, of course. Many would argue that the questions are absurd, as nothing of the kind actually happens. But for those of us who think that reasons do provide justifications and, often, objective truths, our problem is to explain what we mean by this, and how it could be possible in what seems to be a causally closed physical world, a world that, in theory at least, should be completely explainable in its own terms, without recourse to esoterica like “mental content”.

The best philosopher I know on this subject is Thomas Nagel. Both The Last Word and The View from Nowhere lay out the case for why we can’t reductively explain, e.g., logic and mathematics without running up against paradox and contradiction.

Clear and helpful, thank you.

It certainly isn't a confirmed fact that any Gospel was written before any other. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I hold no brief for Ehrman or any other particular Biblical scholar, but surely this is taking skepticism about history too far. What counts as a "confirmed fact" is debatable, of course, but I don't know of any scholar or historian who seriously doubts (and provides some evidence for their view) that Mark was the first Gospel. If you do, could you share that? I'd be grateful.

Good citations, thanks. If I have a beef, it's clearly with Witt and not your interpretation of him!

I'm not sure that isomorphism is the right word, as it suggests that they are independent of each other.

Thought and language are two aspects of the same thing. A proposition is a thought and a thought is a proposition. — RussellA

I'm no Tractatus expert, but I don't think this is right -- wouldn't it be more Witt's position in the Phil. Investigations, rather than here? Leaving aside the perhaps trivial point that we can have thoughts that are non-propositional, we should take more seriously Witt's use of "picture" at so many critical points in the Tractatus. I don't read him as suggesting that language is the only picture-making tool at our disposal.

With that said, though, I agree that it's hard to fit in the "limits of language" quote. But I'm not the first to suggest that the Tractatus, for all its careful organization, is often self-contradictory.